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Daniel Laufer, Department of Marketing, 428 Carl H. Lindner Hall, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0145 Email: [email protected] Phone: (513) 556-7071 Fax: (513) 556-0979. David H. Silvera, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Tromsø, 9037 Tromsø, Norway Email: [email protected]. Tracy Meyer, Management and Marketing Department, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 601 South College Avenue, Wilmington, North Carolina 28403-5902. Email: [email protected] Phone: (910) 962-7202 Fax: (910) 962-3815
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Exploring Differences Between Older and Younger Consumers in Attributions of Blame for Product Harm Crises
A product harm crisis can have a devastating impact on a company. Product-harm crises are defined as "discrete, well publicized occurrences wherein products are found to be defective or dangerous" (Dawar and Pillutla 2000, p. 215). It is worth noting that the damage to a company can be considerably greater than the cost of a potential product recall (Davidson and Worrell 1992). In fact, the erosion of market based assets that depend on consumer trust, brand attitudes and consumers' willingness to purchase in the future (Srivastava, Shervani, and Fahey 1998) is likely to be a more significant cost of the product harm crisis. Examples of high profile product-harm crises include contaminated Coca-Cola cans in Belgium, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Tylenol poisoning crisis in the United States, benzene contamination of Perrier mineral water in the United States and, most recently, defective Firestone tires in the United States, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
How the consumer assesses blame in a product-harm crisis has important implications for a company. If the consumer blames the company for a product-harm crisis, this can have negative consequences for the consumer's future purchase intentions. A number of empirical studies point to the negative ramifications of consumer attributions of blame in a product failure situation. Folkes (1984) found that consumers report higher levels of anger for negative restaurant outcomes as blame is attributed increasingly to the restaurant. In a subsequent study, Folkes, Koletsky, and Graham (1987) also found that consumer attributions of blame toward airlines for flight delays relate positively to anger and negatively to future purchase intentions. Siomkos and Kurzbard (1994) found that even for a company's other products, a product-harm crisis can be detrimental. On the other hand, the more...